Many Ways I've Tried
by The Seventh L
Summary: Rose and Jamie decide to make Egypt a regular destination during their travels - for Donna. /Ten II/Rose; sequel to "I Was Made For You". Spoilers for s4 finale./


There's an Egyptian poet that once said, "_Time never gets tired of Running_." Somehow, they knew like he knew. He knew that when you live outside the reach of normal life, there's only one thing you can do to keep yourself sane and that's to keep moving, keep walking away, keep running through the streets like each step of your worn out white Converse is your last. To run away from an exploding department store, a sky filled with zeppelins, a white wall that he can't cross, a woman whose heart he broke and a woman whose mind he's set aflame.

There will be no running from Rose Tyler, defender of both Earths and woman of his newly-single heart. Not again. She deserves better. She's crossed universes and fought Daleks and risked her life and future for him, and he loves this brave bright-eyed woman who first kissed him on a cold beach in Norway and found room in her own heart for the love of two men: the Doctor, the original model, gone forever in another world; Jamie, the human in a familiar body, who is here right now holding her hand and smiling as they walk through the Cairo airport like honeymooners on holiday.

But even with Rose at his side, Jamie can't forget the woman who is (quite literally) a part of him; the woman who (he knows all too well) doesn't even remember who _he_ is. She's living in Chiswick with no idea of the fantastic adventures she once lived and it guts him to think that it's all his fault - _if I hadn't been born or maybe if I had used the Chameleon Arc or tried to save her before landing on the beach, I had so much time_ - and the melancholy returns in spades as they enter the dry heavy air of Cairo city life so that when Rose looks over to see the expression on her boyfriend's face, she squeezes his hand in sympathy unknown. Even without asking, she knows there's something about this country, about his earlier instance to visit Egypt in the first place, that threatens to bring him down hard.

"Ready to walk in a lot of dust?" she asks, doing that thing with her teeth and her tongue while smiling that never fails to make him smile in return.

"The oldest dust we can find!" Jamie takes Rose's hand into his and they start walking in the direction of the nearest taxi. All they have on them of importance is their passports, Rose's credit cards, his makeshift wonky psychic paper, and a carefully worn blue suit holding in its pocket a blank postcard bought from the airport's little shop for someone who would never receive it, never read what would eventually be written on it.

(Before they had left London, Rose had learned from Jamie that 'a friend of mine' had gone to Egypt once. He tries to keep the 'who' of it from coming up, but in usual Tyler fashion, she figured it out from his words, the look on his face as he talked about this brilliant woman who was now gone.

"Did she like it?" Rose asks, watching Jamie from the foot of her bed as he paces around on the floor, one of his usual quirks.

"Oh, she hated it. All tourist traps and guidebooks and -" Jamie frowns. "Which is why she came back and started looking for me."

"Was it Donna?" she asks and the brief look of heartbreak on his face before bouncing into a story about how she and him met up again is enough to tell her volumes about them, that Donna wasn't just another woman to travel with him and that something horrible has happened or was about to happen to her and Jamie couldn't do anything to stop it. She didn't bring it up again. But she would ask about it later, in Egypt. Maybe. If her nerves did not desert her - because Rose wasn't sure that the mysterious _something_ that happened to Donna wasn't fated to happen to her as well.)

Hours later, they're standing on the outskirts of the Giza Necropolis under a quickly darkening sky, sand swirling around their feet in the wind. The pyramids are lit up by yellow-orange lights, leaving only the very tops still hidden in the shadows. The sight is enough to briefly take Rose's breath away; even with having seen the wonders of the universe, the wonders of her own world still have the power to awe. The wind pulls at Jamie's suit and hair and when he looks at Rose to see the look of amazement, the sight of her with her face faintly lit by the lights of the plateau, blond hair blowing around her in brilliant waves, it pulls at his heart in a way few things have ever affected him. Tonight, she is beautiful and she can do no wrong in his eyes.

And then Rose turns her head to look at him and says, "Did she come here, Donna?" She smiles kindly. "I think . . . if I was her, standing in her shoes looking at all this, I'd probably want to run back to your side too."

He grabs her hand with an energy that surprises even him. "You're not Donna," Jamie says forcefully.

"Of course I'm not," Rose says, blinking in confusion.

"I mean -" and each word that follows is a struggle to escape his lips, "you still remember being with me. I didn't take your life away. I didn't - didn't _kill _you -" Jamie looks away, trying to will his heart to stop beating so fast, to keep the heaviness of Rose's hand in his grasp as long as he can. He's trying to keep his legs from giving under and falling into the sand when Rose pulls him into a tight embrace, his face buried in her shoulder to hide the fact that he feels like he has no more tears to give for Donna Noble, who would never walk on an alien planet's surface and touch strange worlds again and would never remember when she did - and for Rose Tyler, who would never travel the stars in a battered blue police box and carries the memories of the halcyon days when those journeys were still living, breathing reality.

"Tell me what happened," Rose whispers fiercely into his ear. "Please tell me about Donna." She tries to be brave for Jamie's sake, but a slight break in her voice betrays her inner feelings. She's afraid for all of them.

Jamie nods, knowing he can no longer keep the woman's fate bottled up inside any longer. "Okay. But please, promise me one thing." He looks up into Rose's downturned face. "Don't be too mad at him."

Rose nods in return then leans down and brushes a kiss against his forehead. "I can't get mad at the person who gave me you."

And then they're slowly walking together in the cold night air across the dunes, hand in hand, breath escaping their mouths in faint clouds. Rose is grateful for the fuzzy hat she stuffed into her jacket pocket and is now jammed over her blonde hair at an odd angle. She doesn't reach up to set it straight because that would mean letting go of Jamie's hand and she's too involved in his words to care. He's telling her about how the metacrisis affected Donna's human brain and how the only way to stop her mind from burning up is to erase not only all of the things that make her part-Time Lord but the memories of being with the Doctor, of traveling in the TARDIS, of any part of her life up to the one Christmas when she was a runaway bride who thought she'd been kidnapped by a Martian in a suit - all of it gone, and it isn't until Jamie's other hand reaches out to brush at her cheeks that Rose realizes she's crying.

"He'd already told me this before we parted ways," Jamie confesses at the end of his story. "What he was going to do - but I knew it would have to happen, sooner or later. A human body can't handle a Time Lord brain without . . . problems. Oh, Donna." He looks in the direction of the half-illuminated Great Sphinx and sighs. "She won't remember the Christmas we met, or how she went to Egypt to walk in the oldest dust, or our time together because it'll kill her. Sometimes I wish this entire metacrisis business never happened." He swallows, because his next words are hard to admit. "Sometimes I wish I had let her keep her memories of me, even if it wouldn't be for long."

Rose bites her lip and looks away for a moment. When she looks back, her eyes are red-ringed and tired. "But she's alive, isn't she? Donna's still out there, living with her family - right?"

Jamie nods. "Yeah. Not much of a life she has now." He makes a sound like laughter, except it sounds too dark and heavy. "If she knew the life she used to have, she wouldn't be content with just being a temp."

"Hey, some of us used to have lives like that, you know!" Rose protests, taking the jab personally. "Things like working in a shop, buying groceries every week, living day to day in a house with your mum, it's not a bad life." She remembers life before meeting the Doctor and though she doesn't miss it, it wasn't a bad one, just missing a little daily magic.

"She's had better!" Jamie looks over at Rose and adds quietly, "You've had better."

She lets go of his hand, and for a brief moment Jamie thinks she's going to execute a classic Donna move - the face slap - but she simply folds her arms against her chest. "It's called living like a human being - and it's your life too, don't forget. Living on Earth doesn't mean life is all mundane daily tasks. We have our own adventures too." She smiles a little. "Helps when your job is dealing with aliens on a regular basis, right?"

Jamie grins. "Can you imagine Donna Noble working for Torchwood?" he said teasingly. "Her and Jack?"

Rose laughs, a proper kind of laugh. "I can imagine he'd be getting slapped every day at least!" Her smile slips a little. "Can she remember Jack?"

For the first time that evening, Jamie doesn't have a clear cut answer. "Well," he says, drawing out the syllables as far as they will go, "she won't remember meeting him but it won't hurt her to meet him again. I think. Maybe. I don't know." His eyes seemed to become cloudy as he remembered towing the Earth home with his new family - and then losing them piece by piece until the final goodbye on the beach, never to see Donna again.

"Jamie." The sound of his name - his _new_ name - brings him out of his self-induced haze. Rose is standing close to him, looking more concerned than ever. "It's not your fault, you know. You couldn't have done anything."

"I - bloody hell." His shoulders slump forward in defeat. "Yeah." She was right; she usually was about things like this. There was nothing Jamie could have done. There was only one clear-cut answer to Donna's meta-crisis problem, and if he knew himself (he did), there would have been no talking the Doctor out of doing something else. "I'm not used to getting what I want," Jamie admits, and he sounds like a spoiled child even to his own ears. He resists the urge to pout.

Rose tugs at Jamie's sleeve and he looks up to see her smiling. "Let's remember for her then. Isn't that what we came here to do?"

"Yeah." Jamie grins. "Yeah!" And then he's running in the direction of the pyramids, trainers kicking up sand like fountains (_running but now running away_). Jamie shouts "Last one to the Valley Temple of Khafre is a rotten Slitheen!" as he bounces off and soon he's being followed by a grinning, laughing Rose who is keeping her awkwardly perched knit hat on with one hand as she runs after him.

Later that night, Jamie thinks as he's still jogging like a mad man, after they've had a thorough exploration of the pyramids and managed to slip out before they're found by security, as they lie together in their hotel room (hopefully) happily exhausted, they'll talk about the Donna they know, not the Donna that doesn't remember. They will bring her back to Cairo in the form of memories and stories, and together they will write to her a letter on the back of a glossy depiction of Egyptian mythology about how Egypt is a lesser place without her. Maybe he'll grab the latest copy of _Live!_ from the hotel's little shop and read about all the local shows.

Something soft and blonde and laughing knocks into him, sending him stumbling silly into the ground. "Got ya," Rose says triumphantly, sticking her tongue out at the blue suited man sprawled out underneath her.

"Oi!" Jamie protests. "Now there's sand in my hair! It's gonna mix in with my styling gel and get all gunky . . . " His voice trails off as Rose leans in, an absolutely impish look on her face, right before she proceeds to snog him senseless until his lack of a respiratory bypass system has him coming up for air, face a deeper shade of pink.

"Ready to play Indiana Jones?" Set against the light of the moon, Rose's eyes are shining in anticipation. Her energy is certainly infectious, and Jamie smiles back at her despite the grit currently running through his hair. Then she's running, and it's _him_ who is doing the chasing now, long legs carrying him as fast as he can go, all the way to the temple's entrance.

But before they cross the threshold, Rose looks him in the eyes and says, "It's not over, though."

"It's not?" Jamie asks, knowing full well what Rose is talking about.

"Our other world, where Donna and Martha and the Doctor are." For the first time in so long, it doesn't hurt to say his name aloud. "We can remember them without chasing after them."

"Aww, look at you." Jamie grins. "Rose Tyler, defender of the Earth, all grown up."

Rose hits him softly in the upper arm. "Shuddup." She grins. "Come on, we've got an adventure to go on!" So they did.

The next time they get into the outside world, after crawling through the darkened pyramids and the various ruins and dodging some well-hidden traps that were not in the other universe, they both take off their shoes and carry them as they walk through the sand with only the stars above them to guide their feet - and it doesn't bother them a bit.

(A group of tourists in loud shirts and grasping large cameras find themselves giving some odd looks to the barefoot blonde and her toe sock-wearing boyfriend walking through downtown Cairo with shoes slung over their shoulders, wondering whether or not to stand there and gawp or ask for their picture or something else. The blonde nudges her boyfriend and they both look over at the group and start laughing, but before anyone thinks to take a picture, they've disappeared round a corner, lost in the lights and sounds of the city at night.)


End file.
